


What She Sees

by HapaxLegomenon



Series: Machinations [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Past Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 15:44:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12684903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HapaxLegomenon/pseuds/HapaxLegomenon
Summary: Matt's safe, now, and Pidge is delighted to have her brother back.  But Matt's different, and she notices.Set during the end of "The Machinations of Perception."





	What She Sees

**Author's Note:**

> This is a handful of moments from Pidge's perspective in the Machinations AU. I'd recommend reading the first fic in the series before this one, as it will spoil that story, and might not make a ton of sense without the proper context.
> 
> As always in Machinations 'verse, this is not compliant with canon past season 1.

Matt isn’t eating.

He’s sitting with them around the absurdly large dining table, and smirking at a joke from Lance, but despite the spoonful of space chili in his hand, he hasn’t actually eaten more than a bite or two.  Not, Pidge muses, that this is a particularly unusual occurrence nowadays, but that doesn’t make it better.  She isn’t sure if anyone else has noticed his charade, but she certainly has.  She’s observant like that.

She also has her big brother back, after years of searching, so she may or may not be… looking at him.  A lot.  And sure, it’s been a few weeks, but she’s earned some staring, okay.  

He looks so different.  The leg, yeah, and the scars, but it’s not just that.  The Holts are a long and proud line of pasty white people who like to stay inside whenever possible, but Matt’s hereditary paleness has turned into something almost sickly, translucent.  He’s thin, far too thin, like a well-timed breeze would knock him over, and his hair is long and raggedy and he sometimes wears it in a messy ponytail like Pidge used to.  The worst, though, is his face.  His eyes always look hollow and tired, and he’s full of new and disturbing little tics.  His lips twitch, and muscles in his cheek jump, and sometimes he makes short, jerky movements that he doesn’t seem to notice.  He’s been through Hell and back and it’s written all over him.

Matt, in that moment, catches Pidge staring at him from across the table, and he makes a face at her.  She grins, then makes a face back, wrinkling up her nose and crossing her eyes.

He laughs, and her heart flutters with the sound.

“Possum,” Matt says, still grinning, and he mimics the cross-eyed look.

Pidge falters, but she manages to keep a neutral expression on her face as Matt laughs at his own joke.  Okay, so, maybe she has a bunch of reasons to watch him.  Matt’s mind has always gone places Pidge can’t quite follow, but at home, it was things like predicting what each bird outside her bedroom was going to sing next.  Making up goofy mnemonics to remember the shapes of constellations.  Maybe she didn’t always get it, at first, but Matt would always tug on her ponytail and explain.  Birds have patterns and he just watches them a lot.  He can always find Camelopardis before her because of the link between the lion who stalks the giraffe.  Leo to Lynx to Camelopardis, and really, Katie, you should be able to figure that out with how much time you spend looking at Leo.

Matt notices that she doesn’t get the joke, and it seems to confuse him, like the meaning should be clear.  He opens his mouth once, closes it, opens it again, then shakes his head.  Pidge sees a muscle in his jaw working, and the curled fingers of his left hand scratch against the tabletop, then clench into a fist.

“Hey!” she says, a little bit too quickly and a little bit too loudly, and the conversation stops as everyone looks at her.  Matt flinches, but his hand stills.  “Uh.  Oh!  Hey, Hunk, you coming down to my hangar after supper?”

Hunk looks flummoxed.  “Um, yeah, wasn’t that the plan?”

“Okay.  Yeah, cool, cool, I just wanted to make sure.”  She rubs at the back of her head, then sinks down low in her chair, determined to make herself smaller until everyone goes back to whatever conversations they were having.  Good one, Pidge.  Very smooth.

“Space cadet,” Matt teases, and Pidge sticks out her tongue at him and frowns at her chili.

“Lance will clean up,” Hunk volunteers, and Lance yelps a protest, which everyone ignores.  Except for Matt, who watches Lance’s exaggerated objection with a soft, fond smile.

“I’m done,” Pidge says abruptly.  She’s lost her appetite.  She pushes her mostly-empty bowl away and tries not to notice Matt immediately abandoning his own meal.  He used to pig out with her, she remembers.  Squirreled away cups of yogurt and bags of spicy potato chips and jars of chocolate-covered almonds and made a nest of old blankets on the roof.  

Matt glances up at her with a questioning expression.  “I’ll meet you downstairs?” she asks, deflecting.  He blinks, and nods, and reaches to stack her bowl under his.  Hunk gives her a thumbs-up and Pidge almost runs out of the kitchen.

“What was that about?” she hears Keith ask, but she’s too far down the hallway to hear the answer.

“Good job, Pidge,” she mutters to herself.  “Way to be super cool.  Idiot.”  She sighs and scuffs her toe on the floor.  “Stupid Lance.”  

Stupid Matt, she thinks, but she feels guilty just at the thought.  She kicks a piece of scrap near her workbench and slumps onto her stool to sulk, but that gets boring after about forty-five seconds so she picks up a partially-dismantled robot and fiddles with the casing instead.

It’s not their fault.  Matt’s, for being… different, or Lance, for being his friend.  And wow, when she thinks about it that way, she really feels like a jerk.  As if she’s angry with them for trying to be happy.  She scowls and wrenches on the hapless robot.

Matt comes up beside her several minutes later and drapes himself over her shoulders.  “Whatcha got there, Katie-Bear?” he asks.  She gives a half-hearted shrug, but unsurprisingly, it doesn’t dislodge him.  “Robot?”

“Yeah.  I dunno.”

Matt hums.  “You should make me a robot parrot.”

Pidge laughs at the mental image that creates.  “For your space pirate look?  Nah, we’re all high-tech up here.  You need a Rover.”

“What’s a rover?”

Pidge spins in her stool to bring up a schematic on the holoscreen.  “You know those Galra recon bots?  I reprogrammed one, it was super easy actually, the security on those things is bogus.  No big deal.  His name was Rover, he saved the castle when Haxus attacked us back on Arus, I’ve been meaning to make a new one for a while but I haven’t really had the time, and… Matt?”

Matt has gone almost completely still, staring blankly at the wall of the hangar, and he doesn’t respond.

Pidge’s heart sinks.  “Stupid,” she admonishes herself.  She should have guessed that the recon drones could be one of Matt’s triggers.  Since pretty much anything else to do with the Galra is.  She clears the schematic, and squats down in front of Matt to make herself seem as nonthreatening as possible.  Shiro’s flashbacks can make him aggressive -- which is understandable, given the circumstances of the memories -- but Matt tends to be more fearful than anything else.  Of course, it might not even be a flashback this time, he could be hallucinating, or just spaced out.  They all look similar enough on him that Pidge hasn’t yet figured out how to tell the difference.

Matt’s breathing picks up, but his eyes stay fixed on some arbitrary point as he starts to gasp.

Probably not just zoning out, then.

“Matt,” Pidge says, as firmly as she can manage, willing her voice not to shake because it kills her to see her family suffering and be unable to do anything about it.  It has to be one of the worst feelings in the universe.  She fights down her own guilty, fearful reaction and reaches out to touch his knee.  “Matt, what do you see?”

He doesn’t respond.  Pidge sucks in a deep, shaky breath.  She presses her hand more firmly to Matt’s knee and says, “Matt, wake up,” but nothing happens.

A moment later, too late to be a reaction to anything Pidge has done, Matt explodes out of stillness, and he curls in on himself like a scared child, hands over the back of his neck and forehead down to his knees.  His breath comes in harsh, ragged pants that sound like stifled screams and Pidge wants to cry.

“It’s okay,” she manages, but when she reaches out to touch his shoulder, Matt rockets out of his seat like he’s been burned, eyes wild.  She freezes.

Matt stares in unfocused fear for a moment, and then he seems to notice Pidge.  He gulps in big mouthfuls of air, and swipes a hand down his face.  “Katie,” he croaks.  “I…”

And then he turns, stumbling on his peg leg, and he bounce-runs from the room, knocking past Hunk on his way by.

Hunk stops and blinks after him.  He rubs his shoulder and mutters, “Ow,” under his breath.  “What was that one?” he asks, turning back to Pidge.

So nonchalant.  It occurs to Pidge that Hunk’s never known Matt as he was, before Kerberos, before the Galra, before… everything.  None of them do, except Shiro, none of them know how Matt’s supposed to be, funny and sarcastic and bitingly smart.  They haven’t met the Matt who was her hero when she was young.  The best big brother she could ever ask for.  But for Hunk, and the rest, all they see of Matt is someone who blurts nonsense and starves himself and panics and runs.

She feels her face crumple and she throws herself at Hunk.  He catches her easily, and his arms are big and warm and she can hide her face against his vest.  “I think it was my fault,” she says.  Hunk’s broad chest muffles her voice, and she hopes it hides the sniffles, too.  He pats her back and ruffles her hair, and that’s one thing that Pidge can agree with Lance on.  Hunk gives the best hugs.

“I told him about Rover,” she tries to explain, “and he just…” she trails off and squeezes Hunk’s waist.

“Oh,” Hunk murmurs.  “Hey.  Hey.  It’s not your fault.  Right?”

She shakes her head.  “It’s Galra tech,” she insists stubbornly.  “I should have guessed it would be a problem.  I should… I should know better.”

“How?” Hunk asks, in that gentle, mediator voice he has.  “We still don’t know anything about what he went through other than what Lance’s told us from that… cell.  We have no idea what could... could set him off like that.  I don’t even know if he knows, you know?”

Pidge sobs a laugh into Hunk’s shirt.  “That sentence was a disaster.”

Hunk shrugs, acquiescing the point.  Then he puts his hands on Pidge’s shoulders and pulls away, just enough to have a small space between them.  Pidge wipes at her eyes.  “I wish he’d tell us,” she says in a small voice.  Maybe it would help.  Maybe if he could talk it out, it might help.

Maybe he’s already talked it out with Lance or Shiro, a small, bitter part of her brain reminds her, and she frowns at Hunk’s belly.  

“I mean, Shiro still hasn’t told us what happened to him,” Hunk points out, “but we can still, you know, infer the gist of it.  I really don’t think you want to know the details, Pidge.”

Pidge has spent countless nights over the past few years lying awake, staring at the posters above her bed back home or the ceiling in her Garrison dorm or the bulkhead in her paladin room, wondering what happened to her brother and her father.  She’s imagined death, hypothermia and fiery crashes and gladiator fights, and she’s imagined torture and confinement and isolation.  She’s thought of every possibility a hundred times or more, but there’s a deep, frightened part of her that’s sure that whatever the truth is, it’ll be worse than anything she’s imagined.  Hunk’s right.  She doesn’t want to know.

But it’s Matt.  And Dad.  And they went through it alone, and she could have found them sooner.  She should have found them sooner.  She should have taken off the moment she got in the green lion and checked every planet she could until she found her family.  She should have done more.  She should have done _anything._

“He’ll be okay,” Hunk is saying.  “In, like, a relative manner of speaking.  But he’ll calm down.  He’ll be okay.”

“I hate this,” Pidge mutters, and Hunk hums agreement.

Matt doesn’t reappear until much later that night, slinking into Pidge’s lab long after everyone else has gone to bed.  Pidge herself is dozing fitfully at her worktable, too wired to go to bed, but tired enough that she’s really not getting anything done, at this point.  Mostly just scrolling through files hacked from a Galra outpost, looking for any interesting-sounding file names or repeating patterns.

Because she’s distracted, she doesn’t notice Matt coming in and he inadvertently creeps up on her.  She nearly falls out of her chair in surprise when he drops into the empty seat beside her.

“What are you, some kind of ninja?” she gripes.  He gives her a funny smile.

“Thought we agreed on pirate.  How’s that… that, the, um, Rover coming along?”

Pidge shakes her head.  “I wasn’t actually working on it.  And, uh, sorry.  About earlier.”

Expectedly, Matt freezes, but a moment later he relaxes.  “S’okay,” he says.  Pidge is unconvinced.

“You wanna talk about it”? She has to ask, even if she already knows the answer.  Sure enough, Matt shakes his head in a quick, jerky motion.  Figures.

He reaches around her to pick up a metal fidget cube, and holds it up to one eye to see the ball bearing spin.  “Can’t sleep,” he says, and Pidge doesn’t know if it’s a question or a statement.

“Yeah,” she says anyway, and Matt wraps his leg around her chair and presses their ankles together.

**Author's Note:**

> Who wants to guess what I'm working on for NaNoWriMo this year? And who else was beyond stoked to finally see Matt in canon? I love him. If you also love him and want to yell about Matt with me, feel free to stop by my Twitter, [@paxlegomenon](https://twitter.com/paxlegomenon)!


End file.
